Collaborative Crisis Management

Public organizations are increasingly expected to cope with crisis under the same resource constraints and mandates that make up their normal routines, reinforced only through collaboration. Collaborative Crisis Management introduces readers to how collaboration shapes societies’ capacity to plan for, respond to, and recover from extreme and unscheduled events. Placing emphasis on five conceptual dimensions, this book teaches students how this panacea works out on the ground and in the boardrooms, and how insights on collaborative practices can shed light on the outcomes of complex inter-organizational challenges across cases derived from different problem areas, administrative cultures, and national systems. Written in a concise, accessible style by experienced teachers and scholars, it places modes of collaboration under an analytical microscope by assessing not only the collaborative tools available to actors but also how they are used, to what effect, and with which adaptive capacity. Ten empirical chapters span different international cases and contexts discussing: Natural and "man-made" hazards: earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, terrorism, migration flows, and violent protests Different examples of collaborative institutions, such as regional economic communities in Africa, and multi-level arrangements in Canada, the Netherlands, Turkey, and Switzerland Application of a multimethod approach, including single case studies, comparative case studies, process-tracing, and "large-n" designs. Collaborative Crisis Management is essential reading for those involved in researching and teaching crisis management.

"All organizations are under threat from risks both internal and external that can result in serious crises. Managing risk and crisis in a complex, information (and misinformation) rich, and interdependent world is the key task leaders face. In this book Tom Cole, a noted corporate attorney, collaborates with Paul Verbinnen, an expert on communications in crises, to show how leadership should manage risk, and prepare for and handle crises. The steps, plans, and cautions they offer demonstrate that organizations can deal strategically with crisis, survive, and prosper. The authors cover internal and external crises ranging from defective products to cyberattacks and the COVID pandemic. The authors outline a series of steps an organization should take, beginning with an analysis of likely risks and potential crises, with an emphasis on preparation and planning before a crisis happens. After a crisis is over, they stress the importance of reviewing how the crisis was handled to derive lessons for the future. They draw together the legal, organizational, and communications challenges posed by a crisis, showing how they relate to each other in developing strategy. They creatively use examples from recent crises, critiquing how organizations have handled different aspects of crises. This is a book for managers of both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, their board members, those involved in aspects of crisis management, students, and journalists"--

Case studies and analyses investigate how collaborative response to crisis can enhance social-ecological resilience and promote community reinvention.

Modern organizational crises are complex, diverse, and frequent. Ineffective crisis management can result in catastrophic loss. Crisis Management: Resilience and Change introduces students to best practices for preventing, containing, and learning from crises in our global, media-driven society. While covering the strengths of existing works on crisis management, such as systems, leadership, communication, and stakeholder perspective, this innovative new text goes beyond to include global, ethical, change, and emotional aspects of crisis communication. Using her proven transformative crisis management framework, Sarah Kovoor-Misra illustrates how organizations of all sizes can be adaptable, proactive, resilient, and ethical in the face of calamity.

​Using the domain of crisis management, Christian Reuter explores challenges and opportunities for technology design in emergent environments. He therefore empirically analyzes collaborative work in inter-organizational crisis – such as the police, fire departments, energy network operators and citizens – in order to identify collaboration practices that reveal work infrastructure limitations. He also designs, implements and evaluates novel concepts and ICT artifacts towards the support of emergent collaboration. Besides the discovery of potential organizational effects on the ability to deal with emergence he presents methodological implications for technology design.

To aid research in crisis management, we reviewed the literature pertaining to synchronous, non-collocated, cross-organizational, time-sensitive collaboration. We examined the theoretical constructs that researchers have proposed for collaborative systems and determined that several of these, such as common ground and awareness theory, have particular applicability to crisis management. We reviewed collaboration models that were developed to provide frameworks for understanding the multiple facets of technological support to group work. Because teams normally need to come to a common understanding of the situation and the relevant decisions, we examined research in team awareness, sensemaking and decision-making. Types of group tasks affect technology use and adoption, so we considered the literature surrounding these topics, as well, before turning to case studies of new collaboration technologies. We end with our assessment of the findings most relevant to developing new crisis management collaboration approaches, including procedures, needed functionality, and candidate capabilities.

Today’s public managers not only have to function as leaders within their agencies, they must also establish and coordinate multi-organizational networks of other public agencies, private contractors, and the public. This important transformation has been the subject of an explosion of research in recent years. The Collaborative Public Manager brings together original contributions by some of today’s top public management and public policy scholars who address cutting-edge issues that affect government managers worldwide. State-of-the-art empirical research reveals why and how public managers collaborate and how they motivate others to do the same. Examining tough issues such as organizational design and performance, resource sharing, and contracting, the contributors draw lessons from real-life situations as they provide tools to meet the challenges of managing conflict within interorganizational, interpersonal networks. This book pushes scholars, students, and professionals to rethink what they know about collaborative public management—and to strive harder to achieve its full potential.

This book has been replaced by Managing Suicidal Risk, Third Edition, ISBN 978-1-4625-5269-6.

A wide range of natural hazards pose major risks to the lives and livelihoods of large populations around the world. Man-made disasters caused by technological failures, industrial accidents, spillages, explosions, and fires, compound this threat. Since 9/11, security threats based on violence (terrorism, insurgency, and civil strife) have attracted much governmental attention and a great deal of public resources. As the scale, frequency, and intensity of disasters and crises have dramatically increased over the last decade, the failures in responding to these crises have prompted a critical need to evaluate the way in which the public sector responds to disaster. What have we learned? What has changed in the management of disasters and crises? What do we know about the causes, patterns, and consequences of these events? This book looks at some of the approaches that can be taken to empirically examine disaster and crisis management practices. It contributes to the literature on crisis and disaster management, as well as social policy and planning. Introducing approaches that are applicable to a variety of circumstances in the U.S. and in other countries, it offers ways to think through policy interventions and governance mechanisms that may enhance societal resilience. This book was originally published as a special issue of Public Management Review.